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More eyes than ever will be on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, now that a federal judge has refused to immediately block the Trump Administration’s effort to install OMB director Mick Mulvaney as acting director. One thing to watch will be the fate of a planned lawsuit against the U.S. arm of the Spanish megabank Santander.

The agency was reportedly on the brink of filing such an action last week. Its lawsuit, according to Reuters, would accuse Santander of overcharging customers on auto loans through the aggressive marketing of an often unneeded add-on product known as “Guaranteed Auto Protection” or GAP insurance.

Santander has a long rap sheet. Over the past few years, the bank has been investigated for a variety of offenses by a variety of agencies, with corroborating testimony from its own employees in a few cases.

In 2015 the CFPB hit Santander with a $10 million fine for deceptively marketing so-called overdraft “protection” and signing up customers without their consent. (Santander blamed the problems on a contract telemarketer.) Also that year, the company agreed to pay more than $9 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit over the illegal repossession of cars belonging to members of the military. In another troubling story, Santander call-center workers complained about being pressured into predatory lending and debt-collection practices and not being given the time or support to treat customers fairly.

What will happen with the auto-loan case? Here are a few grounds for concern.

Mulvaney, in his congressional days, belonged to a bloc of lawmakers known for taking the financial industry’s campaign money (more than a quarter of a million dollars over four successful House campaigns) and parroting its talking points. He has described the Consumer Bureau as a sick joke and backed legislation to abolish it. A longtime Mulvaney aide, Natalee Binkholder, recently went to work for Santander as a lobbyist. In that capacity, she was deeply involved in Wall Street’s successful effort to get Congress to oveturn a CFPB rule guaranteeing the right of consumers to band together and take banks to court over accusations of systematic illegality.

By the time Mulvaney made his first appearance at the bureau Monday morning, an acting director, Leandra English, was already in place. The White House, in announcing Mulvaney’s appointment, cited a quickie legal ruling from the Justice Department in favor of the President’s right to name someone — despite language to the contrary in the Dodd-Frank Act, which set up the agency. (The DOJ opinion, we now learn, was written by an assistant attorney general who just a year ago represented an offshore payday lender facing a CFPB lawsuit.)

The CFPB was the first federal financial regulator with a mandate to put the interests of consumers ahead of the power and profitability of banks. In its short life, the agency has delivered $12 billion in financial relief to more than 29 million wronged consumers. It has stood up for the victims of for-profit colleges, defended veterans and servicemembers against financial scams, gone to bat for the victims of fraudulent for-profit colleges, and made Wells Fargo pay $100 million in penalties for opening millions of bogus accounts.

The immediate question is about the Bureau’s leadership. The bigger question is whether this vitally important agency will be allowed to go on doing its job.

If you’re a person of color taking out a car loan, odds are you’ll pay a significantly higher interest rate than you would if you were white. Since 2013, the Consumer Bureau has begun to tackle this long-neglected, well-documented problem, both through enforcement and by issuing a guidance on fair lending law compliance for lenders working with dealerships to finance auto purchases. Congress should be praising the Bureau for its fight against auto-loan discrimination. Instead, a shameful number of members of the House voted last month to curtail the CFPB’s work in this area.

On November 18, the House passed a bill, H.R. 1737, which would invalidate the existing guidance and impose burdensome and unnecessary new procedures on any future CFPB efforts to address the issue. The final vote was 332-96, with 88 Democrats voting in favor.

AFR and our allies will do all we can to keep this bad bill from gaining traction in the Senate or being added as a policy rider to a year-end spending measure. Thus far, over 52,000 Americans have signed petitions urging Congress to reject HR 1737. (You can add your name to AFR’s petition here). And ColorOfChange, Working Families, Center for Popular Democracy and Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) delivered over 50,000 of those petitions to the offices of House Majority Leader Paul Ryan, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Representative G.K. Butterfield, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Surprise, surprise: the nation’s auto dealers do not approve of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s crackdown on a loan compensation system that rewards dealers for sticking car buyers with unnecessarily high interest and fees.

But the dealers assure us they are not looking out for themselves. A joint statement by the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) and the National Association of Minority Automobile Dealers (NAMAD) laments the potential loss of “a financing model” that “has been enormously successful in both increasing access to, and reducing the cost of, credit for millions of Americans.” The dealers go on at some length about the threat to convenience, competition, and consumer choice; by contrast, they have not a word to say about any possible impact on their own bottom line.

Here, then, are a few salient facts that, while nowhere to be found in this high-minded document, were rightly examined and considered by the CFPB before it decided to issue a guidance bulletin on potential violations of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA):

The practical effect of the indirect-financing system that the dealers defend is to create incentives for charging higher interest and/or fees than borrowers would otherwise qualify for.Typically, athird-party lender determines the least costly loan that it would be willing to give, and offers to pay the dealer extra for convincing the borrower to pay extra.

It adds up to a lot of extra. Markups resulting from what a layperson might call dealer kickbacks (but which are politely known in the auto lending field as “reserves” or “dealer participation programs”) add an estimated $25.8 billion in hidden interest alone over the lives of the loans involved. Research also shows that the mere presence of a dealer interest rate markup increases the odds that borrowers will fall behind on their payments or have their cars repossessed.

Repeating a well-documented pattern of the subprime mortgage era, the cost of these dealer markups falls disproportionately on Latinos, African-Americans, women, the elderly, and other historically disadvantaged population groups.

Needlessly expensive auto loans, like needlessly expensive mortgage loans, aggravate the persistent divide in average wealth between white and Latino and African-American households. Nationally, the average auto loan stands at $26,691, and total auto loan debt has reached $783 billion, more than Americans collectively owe on credit cards and edging up toward what they owe on mortgages.

The CFPB has put the lenders on notice: if their commission arrangements lead to higher costs for car buyers of color and other protected groups, they could be found in violation of the fair-lending rules of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

The lenders say: don’t punish us for the sins of dealers. The dealers, for their part, protest that while they “strongly oppose any form of discrimination in auto lending,” they should not be punished on the basis of “a theory of discrimination that is based on a statistical analysis of past transactions – not intentional conduct…”

Another way of putting all this is that the lenders and dealers have, between them, constructed a loan-making apparatus expertly designed to cheat, and to cheat certain classes of people disproportionately, regardless of anyone’s provable intent. The CFPB is to be commended for finding a way to confront that outrage with the authority it does, in fact, possess.

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This blog is maintained by AFR as a forum for ongoing news and commentary about the fight for effective financial reform. Blog posts represent the opinions of their authors / posters, and do not necessarily represent the views of the AFR coalition or coalition members.